Bang
by She's Classy
Summary: I hate those damn recordings. After all, it's become obvious that this is all harder on me than it is on him.


**Author's Note: **Bang has won an award!: Best Overall Oneshot in the Summer 2010 Hunger Games Fanfiction Awards. _Huge thanks_ to the judges and to my nominator gethsemane342, not only for the props, but also for causing me to dance around my kitchen like a lunatic.

* * *

I hate those damn recordings.

They come at the end of the week, every week. Sunday afternoon at five o'clock, I can walk behind the B-level nurses going for their dinner and hear the _thunk_ of Plutarch tossing a new one onto the table in the cabinet room. Sometimes if I walk by again twenty minutes later, I can hear Johanna screaming curses or Enobaria telling them _again_ that she has no idea what is going on.

It's when I don't hear anything at all that worries me.

For my first few months in District Thirteen, Haymitch kept the recordings under lock and key. We'd get into fights over them that apparently shook the complex, usually culminating with me ripping my feeding tube out and him having them sedate me. He gave in and declassified them the day I broke my own arm trying to resist being tied down by an absurd number of nurses, and sent me a box neatly full to brimming with recordings labelled carefully with the date received. That night, curled up on my bed, arm in a sling, I quickly learned that the static-filled sound of absolutely nothing was what I didn't want to hear.

Physically they weren't doing anything much worse than what he'd been through before. In truth, it was unnatural things they were doing to cause emotional pain that are breaking him apart... But he never showed it. Not even when, on a tape we received just after my arm healed, the President himself sat down in front of him and told him all the horrible things they were supposedly doing to me a few rooms over.

I suppose I should've been proud: he didn't cry, didn't move, didn't speak- didn't do anything, actually. Just returned President Snow's serpentlike stare with the look that I've seen once before, when I forced him to swallow that syrup when we were sixteen years old. I wasn't proud, though. Instead I was sedated for throwing a chair through the two-way mirror in the briefing room in a fit of anger. Angry with the Capitol, angry with Haymitch, angry with the resistance. Angry with Peeta for not just saying what they wanted him to say, so maybe they'd just kill him quickly and I could go back to wasting away and neither of us would have to endure the torture.

After all, it's become obvious that this is all harder on me than it is on him.

And it's funny how the more tapes come in and the more we watch him slip away, the more precise we are in doing absolutely nothing, comparatively. Suddenly trivial things that we never would've questioned before become the redoubts against losing our freedom. The day that they send a hundred thousand volts through his body at rapid intervals, Plutarch and Haymitch spend fourteen hours straight reviewing maps of the Capitol from reconnaissance. The day that they beat him to death and revive him, only to beat him to death again, my mother does the entire E-Level's laundry. The day they burn a hole in his good leg so deep you can see bone, Prim scrounges up the resources to make enough drop biscuits for most of the District. The day they inform him that peacekeepers dragged my mangled corpse into the President's office after catching me making an escape attempt, something inside of me breaks and Gale and I don't just _sleep_ together.

In his defence, it's my idea. Which, once the pain subsides, I realize is a bad one. It's not the act itself that feels wrong: hell, most of Panem thinks it occurred ages ago and it's no skin off my nose anymore. It's the fact that I have to close my eyes, and when I do, Gale is somebody entirely different. And once we're done, and he's still refusing to sleep until I shut my own eyes, the physical pain if replaced by a dull ache. Which is to say, a realization that this should've happened in another time, another place, and with someone whose face feels as thought it's been burned into my mind.

In the last few seconds before I fall asleep, I wrap Gale's arm around me, trying to find a way to fit.

* * *

I'm in that labyrinth of tunnels underneath the arena, the ones that seventy four years' worth of kids have known as some of their last memories. But I'm not alone, not this time.

I'm following a child- no older than thirteen, with a mop of dark hair- as he navigates his way through the maze. I don't know who he is, or why I'm following through the twists and turns of the ill-lit passages, but when he breaks into a run, I want to run too. Catch him. Hold him back from his certain fate. He's fast, and soon I'm following footsteps. Turning corners. Hearing the door close behind us as we enter his launch room.

He's standing, staring at a small metal object in his hand, on that godforsaken metal plate. I reach him just in time to do nothing, the glass cylinder having permanently sealed his destiny. As I pound on the glass his eyes flicker from his token to me and back again, and they're the bluest thing I've ever seen.

Well, almost ever. Because I've seen them before.

The squealing noise of my clammy hand sliding against the glass as it rises does nothing to muffle the sobs that wrack me as I watch his- no, he has to be _our_- son rise to his death.

Gale's hand is on my stomach when I wake up, and I push it off, sliding further under the covers and letting the tears fall silently. I'm still not sure whether not waking him up is to my benefit, or his.

* * *

It takes twelve more nightmare-filled nights before Gale finally gives up on trying to comfort me. So, at quarter past two in the morning, I find myself stumbling into Haymitch's room- he's the only one with even the vaguest sense of what I'm feeling- and sit on the floor next to his desk and cry.

And cry. And cry. And cry.

When I was little, crying was a refreshing thing: I'd feel clean, maybe a bit soggy, but better. As a nineteen year old sitting on a cold concrete floor, it leaves me feeling twice as bloated with emotion as when I started. Haymitch, ignoring me from the beginning, obviously tunes me out as he reviews scout reports and nurses a flask full of god-knows-what. Finally I'm totally spent, and lie back to stare at the ceiling, blinking slowly in a vain attempt to rid myself of that prickly, heavy feeling in my eyes.

"Feel good to get it all out, sweetheart?"

"No." I sound like I'm talking through a straw, so I sniff loudly, wiping under my nose with the back of my hand, then the back of my hand on my pant leg.

He doesn't look up from the paperwork, just laughs. If I could find the energy to get up and punch him between the eyes, I would, but the cold floor feels so nice on my flushed, hot body that I just lie there and groan, head pounding. "Shut up, Haymitch." I hiccup loudly, as if my body just _wants_ to make my statement sound any less threatening.

I hear him take another swig of his nasty alcoholic concoction and close my eyes, willing myself to fall into a sleep that's not plagued with ghosts of what could've been and could be. "Go back to bed, Katniss."

"I don't want to," followed by another hiccup. Great. Just great.

"S'Loverboy not doing such a good job chasing the demons away?" He's descending pretty quickly into drunk talk, I can tell. Which, with Haymitch, usually ensures fairly productive conversation.

"None of your business."

"Kid, I just let you spend at least an hour making a puddle in the middle of my floor. It's my business now."

As much as I'd love to argue with that, I can't think of anything to say. So instead I swallow an impending hiccup and face the music. "They're not the same as they were."

I hear him slurp. Cough. "The nightmares?"

"No. Well, I mean- yeah. The nightmares. They're not my father, and they're not the Games."

"I don't really need to guess who they're about now, do I?" He shuffles papers idly.

"Probably not." I yawn. My eyes feel even heavier.

"Well, I can't help you fight your imagination. Sorry."

"It's not like you can help me fight off anything real, either." My own voice seems tinny and faded, and I know I'm drifting off.

He ignores the obvious blow to his ego for the first time that I can remember, instead opting to say, "That's his job, not mine."

His voice seems like it's a million miles away. "Mmmhmm," is all I can manage in response. I do hear one last thing before I fall asleep, though.

"We'll find him, sweetheart. I promise."

* * *

The arrow pierces the last guard directly in the abdomen and he drops quickly: as I pass by him I remove it, but not before giving it a final twist to ensure a slow, painful death. I'm through the door and its failed security system in seconds, and there he is, head down, hunched over- broken yet tangible. I can't not run to him, but when I take his hand I notice it's cold. Too cold. Too stiff. Too solid.

I look up to meet his eyes and they're unfocused, cloudy. I weave my fingers between his and tug his hand, not letting myself jump to conclusions.

That's when his head lolls back, a deep red smile of a gash against his windpipe.

I fight to wake up, and when I do, I barely have a chance to roll over before I vomit all over Haymitch's floor.

* * *

Haymitch kept his promise.

We find him four days after my twentieth birthday. Sixty-one days after his. One thousand and seventy-five days since they pulled him from the Arena. One thousand and forty-three days since they started sending us the recordings. Which, as far as I was concerned, meant I was entitled to fantasize about killing President Snow twice as many ways combined for the hell he put us all through.

I didn't get the chance to put a single way to the test though, because in the end, I was wrong. The President's last act in living wasn't to cut Peeta's throat.

He carved out his tongue instead.

It makes sense, though, thinking back on it. It was a fate worse than death for someone who changed a nation with words. I just can't remember thinking that at the time.

I can, however, remember the _snick_ of Haymitch's selfloader pressed up against President Snow's temple, muted somewhere in my mind as I turned Peeta on his side. Cradled his head in my lap. Begged him to stay with me as he fought not to drown in his own blood.

Then of course came the _bang_.

I was too busy watching startled eyes close to notice the sound of the door behind me crashing open. Too busy convincing myself that this was just another nightmare to hear the shouting. Too busy pretending that any second I'd wake up strapped to that stupid table in District Thirteen to take Gale's advice to run. Too busy trying to shake life into Peeta's cold body to hear the _bang bang bang bang bang bang bang_ of the last of President Snow's guards emptying their rounds.

Too busy resting my forehead against his, ignoring the sharp metallic tang of his blood in my mouth, to realize that this wasn't just another nightmare.

It took the piercing pain in my chest and the cold feeling spreading through my limbs to tell that I was very much awake.


End file.
